22Slides

Longer image galleries will automatically display a “back to top” button to allow users to quickly get back to the top of the page and continue navigating your site.

We’ve drastically improved our Dropbox-powered file manager and photo review tool. It’s now much easier for viewers to browse through images and download entire sets. It also automatically inherits the look and feel of your main website.

We increased the amount of time we keep closed accounts’ data safe before being permanently erased, from 3 months to 6 months.

We’ve updated our text editor to provide cleaner and easier-to-manage formatting, which should make it easier to get things looking exactly how you like. We’ve also updated our custom code editor to support the latest browser versions on desktop and mobile devices.

We just released a new streamlined ‘help’ section that features a few things we hope make finding answers to your questions a bit easier:

• Instant topic searching: Now articles are instantly sorted as you type, making it much easier to try different terms while looking for answers.
• Simplified design: Important things are now front and center, with less noise left to get in the way. Our public Q&A section has also been removed because we found that as our platform evolves, old solutions posted in this section often were no longer valid and lead customers down the wrong path.
• Better mobile support: Now looking up a quick reference via your phone is much easier, as the site now matches the rest of our ecosystem in being as responsive as possible.

22Slides has always automatically stripped image metadata (while keeping ICC profiles) to keep file size down and protect your post-processing secrets from prying eyes. But, we’ve just added a new feature to your “Settings > Image Settings” page that allows you to keep this metadata, if you like.

We take our customers’ privacy seriously and pride ourselves in being as non-intrusive as possible with our information gathering, only collecting what’s absolutely necessary to provide the services we do. We skip a lot of the analytics businesses typically perform in order to offer our customers more privacy.

We just published a new privacy policy at https://22slides.com/privacy that outlines exactly what information we collect and how it’s used.

A recent round of updates just launched and among them is the ability to control much more of the look and feel of our horizontal-scrolling image galleries.

It’s now possible to set consistent image sizes, top/bottom margins, and align images to the top, middle, or bottom of the pages, giving you the ability to further customize your website without the need for custom CSS or JavaScript code.

Five years ago today, we launched 22Slides with modest expectations and the intention of providing the best service we possibly could. Now, our clients span over 60 countries and we’re happy to be able to say we still offer the same one-on-one experience as always. Rather than celebrating too much though, we’re working hard on new stuff to be released soon, but in the meantime, here’s what’s new:

New Image Gallery Layout

We introduced a new “Blocks” image gallery layout, which allows for large thumbnails and perfectly-aligned negative space all the way around your page. Check it out by viewing one of your image galleries in your design editor.

Free Domain Names

We’re very happy to announce that our friends at Hover.com have been kind enough to offer free domain names (for one year) to 22Slides customers. So if you haven’t bought yourself a custom domain name for your website, now’s the time to do it. Go to your settings page, then click “setup a custom domain”. It’ll guide you through the process.

We made a few display and usability improvements to image gallery pages too.

• The ESC and ↓ keys will now close photo overlays/lightboxes.
• A new “X” button has been added to overlays/lightboxes too, to make it dead obvious how to close an image.
• We added support for non-square Instagram photos.
• Image descriptions now respect line breaks.

New “Updates” Page

Rather than send emails or write blog posts about every little change we make to our system, we’ve introduced a new “updates” page to the control panels. Whenever there’s a new feature or a change made, there will be a small green circle at the top of your control panel to let you know. You can click the circle and see exactly what we’ve been working on.

Image Handling Improvements

Image upload speed has been improved 300% by adding more servers to handle the files, and we now automatically wipe out all image metadata so you don’t have to worry about people decoding your files to try and find out your settings and post-processing workflow. We DO, however, still keep ICC profiles so everything is still displayed as intended.

Lots of Other Stuff

• A revised sign in page now makes it easy to find and reset your password.
• New, even stronger military-grade password encryption and an improved password reset process have been implemented.
• We added the sender’s IP address to emails sent from a contact form, so you can find information about anyone trying to send anonymous messages.
• New receipt/reminder emails are now sent each month, to ensure no one is ever paying for an account they forgot they had.
• We redesigned the “content” page, improving the appearance of your pages, as well as making the drag-and-drop functionality work much better.
• We now keep closed/cancelled accounts around for 3 months instead of the previous 2, to provide a longer grace period should a client change their mind.
• We made improvements to page redirects to help new sites retain maximum SEO performance when making major changes.
• We added a new optional EU cookies law-compliant notice for those of you in Europe, which can be found on your settings page.

We’re happy to announce our favorite domain registrar, Hover.com, is now offering free domains to 22Slides customers for one year (which is around a $15 value).

If you don’t already have a custom domain name for your website, or were thinking of registering another one, head over to the “settings” page of your control panel and redeem yours now!